Ebunoluwa Akinola
Founder and CEO of Creditclan, Femi Bejide states that he wants to ensure that no one needs to make bulk payment for anything again, whether in education, rent, health or others.
“The plan is to help everyone to afford with ease, the things that they would have had to pay in bulk. So they can pay their rent in instalments, same with school fees, and any other bulk purchase can be conveniently spread across a number of weeks, months”. Bejide said.
People can structure their living standards within their income and live a life of convenience. No one gets his annual income all at once or in bulk, and this is one reason why paying rents, fees and other purchases in bulk puts a strain on income.
The Buy-Now-Pay-Later is a new development that Creditclan recently introduced after about three years of providing credit infrastructure, technology and data to fintechs and banks. As a credit infrastructure platform, Creditclan has been focused on helping to provide credit facilities to clients so that they can better offer credit to their customers.
Creditclan launched the Buy-Now-Pay-Later a couple quarters ago to take credit to where they are sorely needed. This not only simplifies credit infrastructure but also helps banks, merchants, schools, and other businesses offer the pay later option to consumers across Africa.
The idea for Creditclan was born in 2009 when Bejide was managing a small lending house in Lagos State and realised that credit in Nigeria was operating within several constraints.
“It was then I realised the massive infrastructure deficit that credit companies have in terms of data, operations, technology etc. Nigeria and Africa need to solve the credit and growth problems in the continent, and these constraints will continue to pose a challenge. That was what we came to solve in 2018 with Creditclan.
“We are not a credit company per se. We are the technology that drives credit. Some credit companies use our infrastructure and technology to drive their credit. So, we are a credit infrastructure company, not a credit company ourselves,” Bejide explained.
The Buy-Now-Pay-Later is building a last mile for credit, taking it to the point of transaction for schools, parents, rents, merchants, buyers, and others whom the credit companies would not have considered for credit facilities.
There are individuals who are being denied credit by the credit companies and banks due to absence of data to determine their creditworthiness. This includes the self-employed who have no salary structure, those who don’t have limited financial data against which they can be assessed. By filling the data and infrastructure problem, Creditclan is helping the credit companies make better credit decisions and offer credit, not just to salary earners but to other creditworthy Nigerians.
This infrastructure has now been introduced into thousands of schools across Nigeria as School-Now-Pay-Later, so that parents are able to pay school fees in instalments – daily, weekly and monthly based on their income plan.
Creditclan saw that with the current economic challenges, millions of parents had their incomes hit by the pandemic and were struggling to pay school fees in bulk. This in turn had the schools struggling with cashflow.
The school-now-pay-later will help both schools and parents, particularly those where the parents are mostly categorized as underbanked or unbanked.
Creditclan hopes to get up to 150,000 merchants on the buy-now-pay-later scheme by Q2, 2022 so that more sectors like the medical, real estate, and insurance will have businesses offering pay-later options to customers.
